4. Conclusions. ‘Untouched’ package

There is nothing as surprising as what happens when a festival is over. After villagers have left, the Shrine remains as silent, clean and uninhabited as the very morning of the festival. It is hard to believe that there was a happy, loud, playful crowd hours earlier. This would be, for example, an unthinkable concept in fiestas in Spain, where after the fiesta the place is never fully deserted, with people sleeping in the streets and the streets littered with all kinds of food and drinks. The Shrine appears like an untouched package.

The final stage of the festival is not one of unwrapping, but of wrapping up and closing, of reconstructing the original packaged Shrine as found. Wrapping up is a process of moving away from the Shrine, and the last stages of ‘unwrapping feelings’ take place when most of the layers of the wrapping of the Shrine have been concluded and the Shrine is only inhabited by the deity. The final wrapping takes place, and although the Shrine remains untouched the community does not. After the festival villagers know what obligations they have, how they have to behave and present their households. The festival process of unwrapping and wrapping is also a process of internal change and creation of the right conditions for gifts to be exchanged and consumed, and thus acquire the strength, obligation and moral character that is seen as ‘good’ by the community. Ritual prestations play a crucial role in defining the conditions under which individual households are said to participate in the festival process. Ritual prestations are given in order to enact the symbolism of rebounding violence and to enforce the conditions in which ‘strength’ and vitality are extracted from the young, and the kami (foreign deity and state) are incorporated into local affairs.

Festivals are packaged events. A festival is made up of several interrelated ritual processes of layered events. Wrapping is the symbolic time frame through which gifts move, and define the position of the actors in relation to others. I argue that in village festivals, the mikoshi travels tracing the boundary of the village. It displays the control of the sodai in their expansion into the rest of the households. Throughout the return of gifts villagers fight to contain the sodai within the Shrine as well as to pull them out of their confinement. Festivals are in Bloch’s sense about the strong and young, but the appropriation of gifts also takes place at more levels than those of the sodai, the mikoshi, and the kannushi. Women’s gifts are veiled in the process although they are equally as important as the gifts made by men at the moment of the exchange of sake.

The sodai, connected to the expression of the state and culture through wrapping, express their reproduction through the conquests of their immediate neighbours, those who give gifts to them. The mikoshi fight against the danjiri to offer their strength and power, and these are clearly opposed to the senior toya. This political battle, though, dies out at the festival, and only in the cases where the sodai and members of the Yakuba coincide in the same individual does actual political expansion through power take place (see Chapter Seven). Finally, the structure of wrapping and unwrapping reflects, in my opinion, concepts of inhabiting, making space habitable, and transforming the Shrine. In wrapping and unwrapping the process to the Shrine, the journey and its return, villagers have different degrees of closeness to the Shrine. Gifts such as sake and food reflect status differentials but also facilitate the unwrapping of feeling and the acquisition of social obligations. The structure of wrapping on the different process of layering and unwrapping means that, at the drinking party, all villagers alike moved themselves to the last layer, the one farthest from the centre, and that sociability was re-enacted and gifts finally consumed. Relations of power are not so much re-enacted by wrapping but by the capacity of actors to move the gifts and keep them in different layers of the process, sometimes as collectors, sometimes as those ‘thanking’. They force the sodai to use the young to move the Shrine into the village. Villagers move away from giving in the Shrine into other experiences of wrappedness and sociability in the annexed house. During the festival each villager is in a different layer of proximity to the Shrine. As the festival unwraps towards the centre, some villagers are excluded from being close to the centre. The relations between people in the different layers are clearly hierarchical and formal, and a great deal of politeness comes into play. However, as people wrap up the shrine and move to the houses at the periphery of the Shrine, those inside the shrine and closer to the centre move gradually to the periphery to join the rest of men and women there. There, when most of the village meets at the same distance from the centre, politeness, formality and hierarchical relations cede. So I would conclude that the last stages of a ritual are not stages of unwrapping objects and aspects of the Shrine. The last stages have political significance for the neighbours of a community. This stage place all the actors at the same distance from the centres of sacred and political power. There is little difference between sodai, dangiri and the rest of neighbours. There they finally consume the main gifts collected through this process of layering distance from it. Social obligations are re-acquired at this last stage.

Plate 9. Horizontal giving of mochi by the toya after the above ceremony has finished. Mochi is given to celebrate the auspiciousness of the event, and include those people that were left outside the Shrine, but also made gifts to the festival.
Six stages of wrapping and unwrapping a festival:
Plate 8. Sodai giving sake to the deity (and to each other) inside the shrine

Plate 10. Top left: wrapped dangiri with musicians playing to please the deity. Top right: the new gerumikoshi, women carrying mikoshi (including myself). Middle: Unwrapping the shrine at noon. Bottom: feast at a small festival, unwrapping of feelings in my village.

In the previous chapters, I concentrated on the villagers’ understandings of gifts in the context of deity worship and festival exchange. In this chapter I discuss the organisation of household economic life and the extended net of alliances with kin and work. In particular I give detailed examples of chugen and seibo, the two main gift-giving seasons. I argue that although most analyses of Japanese gift exchange look at gift giving as a single model of exchange, several models and ways of knowing about gifts and ‘commodities as gifts’ exist. In this chapter I touch on the links between the ideas of debt, obligation through gift giving, and the issue of commodities and commodity exchange. The pages that follow are premised on the acknowledgement that although ‘gift giving’ and ‘commodity exchange’ represent different sets of social practices, which might overlap in capitalist societies (see Chapter 2, Section 2) they are not homogenous models of exchange. In this chapter I address the issue of how to theorise the relation between these multiple models or ideas. It is misleading, for instance, to present Japan as the industrialised ‘society of the gift’. According to Carrier (1995),

People came to construct and see the realm of the commodity (economy), as distinct from and opposed to the realm of the gift (society)(...). The dominant cultural constructions of these realms exaggerate the changes that occurred and the resulting differences between these realms (Carrier 1995: 201).

This character of exaggeration of changes and differences affects not only the way a society is depicted internally as having different spheres of exchange, but I argue it is also responsible for presenting Japan as exaggeratedly different from other industrialised societies. The material in this chapter shows that it is analytically useful to ask to what extent gift exchange and the notions of obligation in Japan are not a ‘survival’ of the ‘society of the gift’, but on the contrary embedded in capitalist commodity exchange just as much as in other industrialised societies.

I start by identifying some of the forms of associations and annual gift giving occasions that are relevant to the villagers. I locate the groups and associations within the wider town context, and discuss the patterns of exchange among households as well as and the role of kin ties in the exchange of gifts. I then deal with how the notions of obligations and debt enter into villagers understandings of what gifts are, and how they conceptualise ‘commodities as gifts’. Finally, I examine the changes in the notion of giri or obligation as a crucial theme in Japanese gift exchange. A discussion of Valentine’s Day gifts and funeral gifts or okaeshi sheds light on the new ways, ‘creative responses’, of thinking about gifts and obligation.